Oracle, Corp. (ORCL), one of the companies that the "new" HP is hoping to compete with in the enterprise products realm, has observed the mess with great amusement. After all, HP's downward slide began when the company fired successful CEO Mark Hurd for doctoring expense reports to obfuscate his sexual foibles. Mr. Hurd was a close friend to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who called the HP board "idiots" and promptly hired Mark Hurd as a Co-President. Ever since he's been taking the occasional pot-shot at the struggling giant.

I. War of Words Between Oracle and HP/Autonomy Escalates

But in the last week the atmosphere between the two companies had turn from hostile to downright nasty. It all began with Oracle's earnings call in which Mr. Ellison commented, "Autonomy was shopped to us... We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high."

After HP agreed to acquire Autonomy for over $11.7 billion dollars, Oracle commented that Autonomy had been ‘shopped’ to Oracle as well, but Oracle wasn’t interested because the price was way too high. Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO, then publically denied that his company had been shopped to Oracle. Specifically, Mr. Lynch said, "If some bank happened to come with us on a list, that is nothing to do with us." Mr. Lynch then accused of Oracle of being 'inaccurate'. Either Mr. Lynch has a very poor memory or he’s lying. 'Some bank' did not just happen to come to Oracle with Autonomy 'on a list.' The truth is that Mr. Lynch came to Oracle, along with his investment banker, Frank Quattrone, and met with Oracle’s head of M&A, Douglas Kehring and Oracle President Mark Hurd at 11 am on April 1, 2011. After listening to Mr. Lynch's PowerPoint slide sales pitch to sell Autonomy to Oracle, Mr. Kehring and Mr. Hurd told Mr. Lynch that with a current market value of $6 billion, Autonomy was already extremely over-priced. The Lynch shopping visit to Oracle is easy to verify. We still have his PowerPoint slides.

In a Wednesday interview Mr. Lynch again denied this claim, commenting, "We talked about databases."

"Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch continues to insist that Autonomy was never 'shopped' to Oracle. But now at least he remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring, Oracle’s head of M&A, this past April. But CEO Lynch insists that it was a purely technical meeting, limited to a 'lively discussion of database technologies.' Interesting, but not true. The slides Lynch showed Oracle’s Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring were all about Autonomy’s financial results, Autonomy’s stock price history, Autonomy’s Price/Earnings history and Autonomy's stock market valuation. Ably assisting Mike Lynch’s attempt to sell Autonomy to Oracle was Silicon Valley’s most famous shopper/seller of companies, the legendary investment banker Frank Quattrone. After the sales pitch was over, Oracle refused to make an offer because Autonomy’s current market value of $6 billion was way too high.

We have put Mike Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales-pitch up on the Oracle website – Oracle.com/PleaseBuyAutonomy – with the hope Mike Lynch will recognize his slides, his memory will be restored, and he will recall what he and Frank Quattrone discussed during their visit to Oracle last April. Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle. Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed (see next paragraph). Tomorrow, he will need to explain his slides.

Mike Lynch describes his meeting with Oracle: "On one of my trips to SF (April 2011), Frank Quattrone whom I have known for a long time offered to introduce me to Mark hurd. Oracle was a customer and I have never met him, so it was a good opportunity. Frank does this from time to time on my visits, he has introduced me to many people. . NOTE: Frank was not engaged by Autonomy and there was no process running. The company was not for sale. I recall meeting with mark and someone else I believe called Doug. At the start of the meeting they joked that frank was there to sell them something. Frank and I made it clear that was not the case. We then met and had a lively discussion about database technologies. The meeting lasted approximately 30 mins. Frank is happy to confirm this."

Oracle then posted slides [1][2], verifying publicly that the April meeting in question was between Qatalyst Partners, the financial firm retained by Autonomy in exploring sales options.

Frank Quattrone, the Qatalyst Partners banker involved in the meeting, issued a statement to the Financial Timescommenting, "The slides Oracle posted publicly were sent by me to Mark Hurd in January, were prepared by Qatalyst and were for the purpose of our independently pitching Autonomy as an idea to Oracle. These slides were not used in our April meeting with Mark and Doug."

In a response printed by the UK's Guardian (the second most read online English newspaper in the world), an Autonomy spokesperson adds:

Last week in response to a question about unstructured information Oracle made some less-than-enlightened comments on the subject, which Autonomy has been pointing out in the press.

Now, as an attempt at diversion from their poor positioning, Oracle has raised the issue of whether Autonomy was "shopped by its management team" to them.

In April 2011, there was a meeting for approximately thirty or forty minutes between Autonomy and Mark Hurd, which was set up by Frank Quattrone as an introduction to Mark Hurd. Oracle is an Autonomy customer. It was made clear that Autonomy was not for sale and no sale process was under way. Mr. Quattrone's company was not engaged by Autonomy at that time. There has been no other contact with Oracle since then.

It may well be that investment banks were independently recommending Autonomy as an acquisition target to industry players – that is standard practice for — but this would not have been at our behest. Qatalyst have informed us that the slides Oracle has recently posted on its website were prepared and sent independently by Qatalyst to Oracle on 26 January (the content is clearly from January). This is the first time we have seen them. Autonomy was not involved in this nor was Qatalyst engaged by Autonomy until mid-year. Autonomy did not present these slides in the meeting.

Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help.

CEO Mike Lynch commented that he was "flattered and amused by all of the attention."

II. Why is Oracle so Intent on Discrediting HP's Leadership?

The story has swept the blogosphere like a bad soap opera. And by the sound of it there may yet be more he-said-she-said before this story dies down.

So why is Oracle so eager to discredit HP and Autonomy. Well with HPshare prices at recent lows, some believe that Mr. Ellison, whose company has $30B USD in free cash, is eyeing an acquisition of HP. However, HP's market cap sits at around $46B USD, so it's still teetering just out of the reach of Mr. Ellison's maw.

But if Mr. Ellison can discredit HP's Board as behaving unsoundly from a business perspective, he can both try to depress the company's share price and appear sympathetic to disgruntled HP shareholders, who would have to eventually approve a purchase.

What does all this mean for consumers? Not much that hasn't already been said, but there is the possibility that if Mr. Ellison is indeed playing at buying HP and he succeeds, that the spin-off of the Personal System Group could be averted. This would mean that HP -- as the public knows it -- could survive in one possible scenario, at least.